LONGMONT -- As Longmont has added more jobs over the years, it's been the job of city planners and traffic engineers to try to stay ahead of the traffic and prevent gridlock.

Some things, such as the flow of traffic on Hover Street, really haven't changed that much in the past few decades.

"We moved here in '85, and it was primarily everybody getting up in the morning and leaving and coming back at night," said Nick Wolfrum, engineering services manager for the city.

"Hover is still very directional," said Bob Ball, the city's traffic engineer, adding that it's still mostly southbound traffic in the morning and northbound in the evening.

But elsewhere there have been significant changes over the years. Wolfrum and Ball work closely with city planners and, on a more regional scale, the Denver Regional Council of Governments, to try to anticipate which expensive road projects need to be tackled next.

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In the past decade, two major road projects have helped traffic flow in and through Longmont. The first of those was the Ken Pratt Boulevard Extension, which opened in 2004.

The 3-mile extension allows for continuous east-west traveling on Ken Pratt, which becomes Colo. Highway 119 east and west of the city. Almost instantly after it opened, the city had to open a second-left turn lane for people turning onto Third Avenue from Ken Pratt.

City of Longmont traffic counts show that about 33,000 cars were traveling the road daily in 2011, an increase of 22 percent in just a year.

A good portion of those are commuters driving from the Carbon Valley to jobs either in Longmont or perhaps Boulder.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data, only 4 percent of those living in the 80504 area code -- which includes most of Firestone and Frederick -- also work in that ZIP code.

The other major road improvement of the past decade in Longmont has been the widening of Airport Road to four lanes. That's helped take some of the pressure off Hover Street, Wolfrum said.

"As you see redevelopment of the mall, Airport Road then will become that much more important," said Wolfrum. "People who need Hover Road to get to the mall are going to use that, and that's going to create more congestion."

The redeveloped mall property is scheduled to be about 70 percent completed by the end of 2014, and Wolfrum said that during construction and after the new mall is built, he expects Airport will continue to see more and more volume.

Hover and Nelson Road is already one of the city's busiest intersections. Much of the traffic on Nelson uses it to access two of the city's largest private employers, Seagate and Amgen. Dozens of other, smaller employers populate the large business park known as The Campus at Longmont, parts of which are located in the area bordered by Dry Creek Drive on the east, Clover Basin to the south, Fordham Street to the west and Nelson Road to the north.

"The vast majority of employers prefer that part of town," said John Cody, president and CEO of the Longmont Area Economic Council. "I think it's sort of psychological -- I think they feel like they're a little closer to Boulder. That's also where a lot of the original (commercial) development occurred, and there's also a lot of amenities on that side of town."

Erin Fosdick, a senior planner for Longmont, said there's still vacant land on that end of town that could accommodate more employers, some of which is already within the city and some that's in the city's planning area.

Wolfrum said his department works closely with Fosdick's to try to anticipate where road improvements will be needed.

"This year, we're going to be doing an update of the transportation model, which has not been done in eight or 10 years," Wolfrum said.

Things do change, and that can make the city alter its plans for roadwork, Wolfrum said. For example, extensive development -- residential and commercial -- had been planned north of Colo. Highway 66 between Main Street and Hover. Now, most of that land is open space.

"At one time, they were predicting very high traffic volumes (on that stretch of highway)," Wolfrum said.

The economy of recent years has had an effect on traffic volumes in Longmont, Ball said. Part of that is the job base, which has been more or less flat for the last decade. Also, the Bolt bus, which runs between Longmont and Boulder, has seen steadily increasing ridership, he said.

"We're still at '05 or '06 traffic levels in Longmont," Ball said. "(119) has continued to grow, but we've seen some areas that have gone down."

Since 1996, the LAEC, along with its economic development partners elsewhere in Boulder County, has conducted a Labor Migration Study every other year to determine where people are living and working. The 2012 survey found that 32 percent of the respondents lived and worked in Longmont, compared with nearly 39 percent in 2010.

"For the first time, we have most of the employees coming from somewhere else," Cody said, adding that he thinks most of them are coming primarily from Weld and Larimer counties. "What it means to me is that more people are commuting to Longmont to get to work from somewhere else, and it's significant. In the early part of the (2000s), more than half the people were both living and working here."

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